I slept through: the uncalculated dismantling of democracy
An ‘I slept through the week’ special edition
Ahh, remember election week. If a train could carry hundreds of millions of passengers, and for some reason a red and blue train were heading opposite directions on the same track at about 3km/hr, then ‘train-wreck’ would indeed be an appropriate metaphor for what I was unable to tear my eyes away from.
The news headlines read: “there is no news yet”, “when will there be news?”, “there may not be news for days, but please keep refreshing, it’s great for our ad revenue”, broken up by the odd opinion piece along the lines of “Dear God, please put me out of my misery and start telling me about the thousands of people dying again.”
Did I mention the train drivers were yelling lies at each other?
This election nightmare, the only thing people found themselves united in was bemusement over how so many people could be so stupid, even if their fingers were pointed at each other, and even if sometimes those fingers were guns.
But is it really feasible that over 70 million people from one of the most educated countries on earth are really idiots, whether the idiocy was in ‘believing blatant lies’ or ‘ignorance of a corrupt election process’, as either side still alleges? I refuse to believe that America rose to be the superpower worthy of their renowned arrogance by dragging half a population of dunces along for the ride.
Why are so many people displaying idiot-like symptoms if they’re not actually idiots?
On a two-week trip to India I got scammed twice. So I’m well qualified in seeming like an idiot.
It taught me a lesson which was worth the rupees. It was a classic strategy from the con artist’s playbook (a book I wish I’d picked up from the departure terminal bookstore):
Giving verifiable but selective truths helps gain trust, which lends credence to lies
Once you have someone’s trust, you can get away with telling a lot more lies. And with a network of peers echoing the story, belief is strengthened through the appearance of validation by multiple sources.
Us humans are awful at comprehending how our puny existence relates to the vastness of everything (yes you—your existence is puny). The relevant vast thing, in this case, is information.
More than 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, there are over a 1.2 million subreddits to immerse yourself in. Saying there’s a lot to choose from is an understatement, and while the time we spend online and on social media is increasing (up 70% between 2012–2019), there’s still not enough hours in the day to take it all in.
How good are buffets?
Another frustrating habit of silly humans is that we tend to pay more attention to the things which make us feel good.
Imagine going to a luscious (but in this case, metaphorical) buffet with freshly baked breads and cheeses, seafood platters and a grand dessert bar. More food to choose from than you could possibly consume. Oh, there’s a huge table of salads that a few people walk past from time to time, too.
At one point you see a guy take a few croutons to put on his ice cream… you reflect on any decisions you’ve made in life that you might one day regret.
It would be healthier to smash some world class salads and call it a day, but who doesn’t reserve half their appetite for dessert bowls, right?
We have the same problem with the information environment. It’s not that believable lies are more accessible, it’s this:
There’s enough true information out there to support even the most untenable of beliefs, and we’re more likely to listen to it
Even a small fraction of the total information available is still an insanely huge amount of information; enough to take up our information diet.
Back to the smouldering tar-pit fire of the 2020 US election
In any game-like environment, the player with the most effective strategy will rise to the top. To be elected leader of a country, that strategy used to be something like creating jobs and reducing unemployment. Now the optimal strategy is simply saying you are going to create jobs, and that you have already created all the jobs, and one should be just around the corner any day now—everyone else has a job, remember how I told you?
Thanks to an exploitable, diverse information ecosystem of ‘alternative facts’ and echo chambers, leaders have figured out they don’t have to fuel large propaganda machines to say whatever they want anymore.
Not like back in the good old days, when we use to have the posters and the radio stations and the threats to one’s family. No, now the job of propaganda is taken care of independently, facilitated by the some of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world.
Acknowledging opposing facts is hard too.
There have been (some) problems with mail in ballots and issues with polling booth machines, but this is true every election and enough votes have been counted confidently for a clear result. Covid is an order of magnitude more dangerous than the flu, and lockdowns work, but there have been issues with testing accuracy, and mass unemployment that disproportionately affects the lower-middle class is dangerous in many ways too.
People don’t put these types of opposing facts in the same sentence enough; we’re scared to, partly because doing so can imply equal weighting of unequal points.
It’s uncomfortable that things aren’t black and white, but let me leave you with a practical tip for when Twitter says you have run out of characters for adding nuance and qualification:
Just scream the rest of your tweet into a pillow! Studies show it is more effective than attempting meaningful discourse with users who have flag emojis in their username.